Anna Akhmatova was considered to be an important figure in Russian poetry after her first book was published. The love poems in her first book, Vecher (Evening) (1912), explored the subject of love from all angles, giving, according to Russian critic Leonid I. Strakhovsky, "all the things that everyone might feel and understand, though perhaps less deeply and personally than the poet." Strakhovsky, in his 1949 book about Akhmatova and her contemporaries, Gumilyov and Mandelstam, went on to note that years of inactivity had not changed her much despite having been silenced by the Soviet government for fifteen years. "Her voice was now reduced almost to a whisper and her eyes were dimmed as she looked at the present through the mirror of the past," he wrote of her 1940 collection, "But her mastery was still the same." The Times Literary Supplement, reviewing her Selected Poems soon after her...